Regarding the Eighteenth Century: Vernon Lee and Emilia Dilke Construct a Period

Abstract

This chapter looks at these two works, Vernon Lee's Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy and Emilia Dilke's four volumes on French painters, architects and sculptors, furniture and decoration, and engravers and draughtsmen of the eighteenth century. It addresses the Englishwomen's sense of their own cultural positionality, their performed foreignness, and think about ways in which wider discourses about gender, hybridity, and difference may be said to have shaped, even enabled, their historiographical practice. Lee is clearly entranced by the eighteenth century as spectacle, as her many luscious descriptions of carnival and other theatrical pleasures attest. Furthermore, her own representation of the period is highly staged – a piece of theatre, like the extravagant operas and shows she invokes for her readers. Early in French Painters, Dilke writes at some length about the favourite's relationship with Boucher, her patronage of whom had begun with her reign.